“Intelligent Design”

By Stan Cox, on September 25th, 2005

Last autumn, Dover’s (Pennsylvania, SC) school board instructed its ninth-grade biology teachers to tell students the theory of evolution is an incomplete one, and that intelligent design, which says biology’s minutia presents evidence of an intelligent creator, is an alternative argument to evolution”…

…”Supporters of intelligent design say the argument has nothing to do with the Bible, God or the Judeo-Christian account of life’s origins found in Genesis. But a group of doubting parents sued the district in December, saying intelligent design amounts to a religious belief, and has no place in a biology course.

The three-paragraph statement read to students is unconstitutional, they say, because it implicitly endorses a superhuman creator, and that breeches the church-state separation wall. Thompson argues it’s ironic that a group advocating civil liberties would endorse the censorship of a particular idea.”…

…”The Harrisburg trial is not the first to consider the ideas of evolution and religion. There’s the 80-year-old Scopes “Monkey Trial,” during which defendant John Scopes was found guilty of a state law that banned the teaching of evolution. In 1968’s Epperson v. Arkansas, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Arkansas statute which prohibited the teaching of evolution. In the 1980s came McLean vs. Arkansas and Edwards vs. Aguillard, which overturned acts demanding schools give equal time to the evolution and “creation science.” And in Georgia, a suburban Atlanta district is still fighting a judge’s order to remove stickers in science textbooks which say evolution is “a theory, not a fact.”

Bill TolandPittsburgh Post-Gazette

Analysis:

Evolutionist advocates have long held it to be inappropriate to entertain in the classroom the viability of the creation account. “That is religion”, they say, “and a violation of the principle of the separation of church and state.”

Now that an argument regarding the intelligent design of the universe is being made based upon scientific principles rather than an appeal to scripture, the complaints remain.

However, the assertion that the concept of a divine being is unscientific, is just that, an assertion. Just because it contains an element of “religion” does not make it invalid. In effect, scientists are not willing to entertain a plausible explanation of the origins of the universe and life just because it does not fit into their arbitrary pigeonholes.